photographing strangers

spectators on the circle line touring manhattan island

I’ve always had a love a hate relationship with street photography.

Someone once took a photo of me (with pink hair) walking down the street in Shanghai, and posted it on a stock images website for public use. My face can be seen clearly in the photo, and the photographer had caught a moment of confusion on my face as I’m listening to music. When I happened upon the image randomly attached to a Vice article about Chinese youths, I felt indignant that not only has my privacy been invaded, my image was being used to misleadingly tell a story that I had no part in.

At the same time, I love looking at photographs taken on the street of subjects caught in their lives, unaware. These candid photos capture something raw and genuine about our daily lives that posed photos, or even photos of familiar subjects can’t purport to have.

As a photographer, I’m interested in observing the world around me with my camera. Yet I’m scared to get close and personal, afraid to cross some invisible line and invade into people’s personal space and privacy. I think that’s exactly what makes street photography so tantalizing and interesting to the viewer.

I’ll leave you with some photos I took of strangers on film with you. Not too close, but enough that I can imagine some stories of who they are in that moment.

a pair (or perhaps a couple?) look out onto the city of naples

a botanist (?) taking a break at the berlin botanical gardens

a visitor interpreting modern art in berlin

a scholar taking a reading break at the monkey temple in kathmandu

hotel staff (?) checking on air conditioning units in miami

yakitori chef making sure the chicken is grilled to perfection

two sisters having a heart-to-heart chat at the neue nationalgalerie

image conscious guy waits to get his photo taken

woman probably striding to the bathroom at hamburger bahnhof

berlin man misses the temporal beauty of the cherry blossoms just behind him as he creates value for shareholders

This week’s links

• I was an avid consumer of daily news podcasts, but the recent coverage of the war on Gaza has left me feeling apprehensive about mainstream Western media and their lens on current events. I’ve been really enjoying this new-ish weekly podcast on culture from The New Yorker and their coverage of films, books, pop culture at large, and how that feeds into our culture.

• I’m someone who needs background music to work, and I’ve been playing this jazz arrangement of Zion.T’s music a lot in the last few weeks.